


An Unending Dream

by Xairathan



Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: F/F, Hanahaki Disease, because how do you have someone named sakura saber and no hanahaki au, y'all slacking on the oknb front
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 12:20:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21118685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xairathan/pseuds/Xairathan
Summary: request: based off a song by eve (now with bonus Hanahaki)





	An Unending Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [corgasbord](https://archiveofourown.org/users/corgasbord/gifts).

> Fic based (very) loosely off Eve's song [raison d’etre](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulfY8WQE_HE).

Okita knows well the heavinesses of life. The smooth resistance of flesh on metal. Her sword against her palms, singing crimson into the air. That same blood pooling in her lungs. Its tacky heat between her fingers. They follow her beyond death to this new existence she’s been given. They’re fragments of a legend, one given the name of Okita Souji.

What Okita coughs into her palm this morning isn’t something she recognizes. Fresh blood is neither soft nor ridged. Okita tears her hand away from her mouth with some effort, and plucks an irregularity from amidst the pink. It dances between her thumb and forefinger, twirling under her breath. A fresh petal, slowly greying, given life from the Sakura Saber.

* * *

It’s said that Okita Souji was an emotionless manslayer, a terror on the battlefield. She’d committed her life to the sword and the Shinsengumi. She would laugh and drink with her men, but little else.

In Chaldea, the First Captain of the Shinsengumi chases Oda Nobunaga through the halls, brandishing the plastic katana that Nobunaga’s replaced her sword with. Nobunaga, never one to mind regulations, sprints laughing with a live sword clutched haphazardly between her hands. In any other life, they’d be enemies; here, they’re roommates, partners, close friends. They share a futon, guard each other’s backs.

Nobunaga rounds a corner, vanishing from sight. Okita’s hot on her heels, not even a second behind, when a familiar tickling rises in her chest. She winces, stumbles, catches herself against the wall. Tremors wrack her body and echo down the corridor. Down at the very end, a door hisses open, and Nobunaga pokes her head out. The sight of her, eyes wide and glistening with worry, brings a tickling against the roof of Okita’s mouth. Before Nobunaga can say anything, Okita turns and runs, coughing into her hand. When Nobunaga catches up to her, Okita opens her clenched fist to show her that it’s just the usual, nothing to worry about, brittle petals dissolved into lumps indistinguishable from blood.

* * *

With waking comes a strange liminality. Chaldea’s bright lights could be a noon sun. Nobunaga, with her flowing hair, could be her sister, crouching over her. The difference lies in her throat, occupied by an uncomfortable lightness. She has to cough it out so she can breathe; she can’t, because Nobunaga is there.

“Hey, Okita, I made you some tea. Here.”

Nobunaga gently pries Okita’s fingers apart and pushes something between them. A bowl, still warm. Another difference, here: Kondo and Hijikata would call her First Captain, her sister, Souji. Nobunaga is the only one Okita knows who speaks her name with the same delicate care she brings to their bedside.

Okita brings the bowl to her lips and drinks. Hot liquid races down her throat, withering away the accumulated petals. She can swallow them down now, a solid mass of sweetness. She gags; she wants to throw up. Nobunaga’s hand massages her back soothingly. Okita squeezes her eyes shut, forces down more tea, coughs half of it back up. Flecks of red dot the amber liquid. Her look of relief goes unmentioned, but not unnoticed, by Nobunaga.

* * *

In her dreams, she becomes someone else. She becomes someone who can bear the imagined weight of Nobunaga in her arms. She becomes someone unbound by her name. Okita Souji knows nothing of love; Okita Souji would not let Nobunaga, in a dream or not, plant kisses against her jaw, the side of her neck.

Time moves differently in her sleep. Each brush of their skin seems an eternity. Every murmur of her name sends a fresh wave of nausea through her. Nobunaga would never be so affectionate, nor Okita so pliant under her fingers. That’s what she must believe to return to reality whole— that whatever happens between them is relegated solely to her dreams.

She could, of course, let that become a reality. She could let herself love Nobunaga, but what would that leave her with? Her legend is not one that resounding through time like the other Servants’; compared to them, she isn’t even the genius that history has claimed her to be. She’s a human with a sword and one fatal strike, and little else. Surrendering even a portion of herself is unthinkable. She would rather relive the legend of Okita Souji, down to her final breaths, than acknowledge what roots those growing clusters of flowers to her chest.

* * *

She couldn’t keep her illness hidden from Hijikata and Kondo forever. She can’t keep it a secret from Nobunaga, either. It’s abrupt, a sudden shifting of her world, just like the first time she’d opened her fist and found it stained with warm and bubbling pink.

Nobunaga leans across the kotatsu, deliberate and slow, and picks up a handful of damp petals in her fist. Okita, still doubled over, can’t do anything to stop her. She hides her face in the sleeves of her haori, and waits for Nobunaga to chastise her.

Instead, a single, strained word. “Who?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Okita, if you don’t tell them, you’ll die—”

“And? I’ve died before!” Her eyes flash with vibrant anger, her voice as hot as Nobunaga’s fire. “We know what happens to Servants who die. Gudako just resummons them. It’s not as difficult as you think it’ll be, Nobu!”

“So what?” Nobunaga fights to extricate herself from the kotatsu. She’s gotten so used to leisure and warmth that she’s forgotten, momentarily, all semblance of the raging fire that history claims she is. “You’re gonna let yourself waste away again when you can stop it, just because you’re too chicken to tell someone you like them?”

“Don’t you dare call me a coward!” Okita rises too, a single fluid motion. She has the advantage of height and practice; if this were anyone other than Nobunaga, it would’ve been impressive. All she accomplishes is getting Nobunaga to storm up to her, jabbing a finger where Okita’s tasuki crosses itself.

“What is it, then?” Nobunaga glares at Okita, her gaze as furious and violent as the inferno that had claimed her life. “Oh, don’t tell me it’s someone impossible. Don’t tell me it’s stupid Hijikata.”

“And what if it is?”

“Is it?"

“That’s none of your business, Nobu!”

“It is!” Nobunaga shouts, bringing her fist down on the kotatsu. Her cup of tea upends, a field of golden liquid coating the wooden surface. “It is when you dying means you’ll forget everything that’s happened between us! Does that mean so little to you, Okita? Do I? Didn’t you say we were- had some sort of fated connection? You said that, not me!”

“Maybe I was wrong!”

“Do you really think that, or are you just saying it?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because whatever you decide doesn’t just affect you, Okita!”

“Yeah, and what if what I decide is something you don’t like? Are you going to burn me, just like you did everyone who disagreed with you back in your time?”

Immediately, Okita knows she’s gone too far. Nobunaga breaks off, storming a wide circle around the room before heading towards the door. Okita doesn’t try and stop her. They’d gotten too heated, as much as—

—as Kondo and Hijikata, before Okita would step in between them. She should be ending fights, not starting them. As Okita looks up, she catches Nobunaga with her hand on the doorframe, shoulders hunched and head hung.

“Hey, Okita.” Nobunaga pounds her fist once against the mantle, as if testing its sturdiness, or her own. “It’s your choice, but just— think about it, won’t you? Please.”

The door hisses shut, leaving Okita to wonder if she’d only imagined the tremor in Nobunaga’s voice as she retreated. This might be, she realizes, the only thing that Nobunaga has wanted that she can’t— and wouldn’t— take by force.

Okita sinks to her knees. Her greaves dig into the pillows they’d dragged over to the kotatsu. Nobunaga’s right. This time, there isn’t even any question to it. If she dies, none of what she remembers of Nobunaga will carry over. They’ve seen enough resummons to know that nothing will be left; she’d be lucky if even a vague impression of Nobunaga survives in her recollections.

‘Okita Souji’ wouldn’t remember Oda Nobunaga. Something might survive in her dreams, but never those sweet imagined realities. What she knows of Nobunaga belongs to her alone, to this concept of Okita Souji given renewed life. What would dying here accomplish, other than a repetition of what Okita Souji regards as her greatest and only failure?

Okita reaches for the table, swaying, the world lurching around her. She can’t bring her hand up in time to stifle the spray of petals that emerge from her lips. They come accompanied by clotted blood, and this time, one whole flower, its edges tinted red. Okita puzzles over it for a moment, turning it over, an uneasy sensation gathering in her chest. It takes her a moment to realize it’s not flowers or tuberculosis, but a new and long overdue resolve. Wiping her mouth dry, Okita gathers her feet under her, preparing to go after Nobunaga. No longer will she let her life be dictated in terms of death.

* * *

An abandoned hallway is Nobunaga’s favorite place to eat konpeito. There’s no one to bother with the resonant crunching or the rattle of candy against glass. If Nobunaga could be said to have a nervous habit, this would be it. She hardly raises her head as Okita approaches, instead pouring out another handful of candy and appraising it with a weary eye.

“Ah, Okita,” Nobunaga laughs. She sounds far too tired for having walked only a few minutes’ distance away. “Come to give me another earful, huh?”

“I—” Okita swipes at Nobunaga’s palm, taking one for herself. She ignores Nobunaga’s grunt of protest, itself more an instinct of Nobunaga than any indicator of frustration. “I overstepped with what I said. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, coming to apologize? That’s a new one.” Nobunaga pops a candy into her mouth, but doesn’t bite it. There’d be no satisfaction in it, not now. “Apology accepted. One less thing for you to worry about—”

“Nobu.” Okita grabs Nobunaga’s wrist. Red eyes slash towards her, not narrowed, but no less intent. “Just listen to me, okay?”

“Yeah?” Nobunaga pops the rest of her candies into her mouth all at once, grinds them to dust, swallows. “Fine. What is it?”

“You were right. I’ve been being stupid about— well, a lot of things.” Okita shakes her head, laughing softly. “You… remember what I told you what I’d wish for if I won a Grail?”

“To keep fighting?”

“Isn’t that dumb?”

“Not if it’s what you want.”

“But it isn’t,” protests Okita. “That’s what— that’s how it would go, according to the story of Okita Souji. But that’s not all of who I am. Okita Souji would never have met Oda Nobunaga, or…”

“Or caught a disease based off the concept of love,” Nobunaga scoffs.

“You know what I mean.” Okita steps closer, releases Nobunaga’s hand. “If I died, I’d just be going back to that. I’d forget you, and that’s—” Okita swallows past the petals gathering in her throat, rubbing her chest. Only a little longer, she thinks. “The last thing I want is to forget all of this.”

Nobunaga’s expression goes slack. Her eyebrows knit together before one arcs slightly above the other. Carefully, she ventures a question. “So you were joking about it being Hijikata?”

“You’re such an idiot, Nobu,” Okita sighs.

“Who’s the one who’s been running around with flowers in her chest for way longer than she needs to?” Nobunaga retorts. She spreads her arms wide, fingers curled inward, gesturing to Okita. “Come here. Come here, Okita.”

With a smile and a shake of her head, Okita lets herself fall forward. The distance between them is short, but depthless. She sinks into Nobunaga’s embrace as if it’s where she’s belonged all along, more natural than even the name from which she draws her being. Nobunaga’s lips graze the top of her head, and the fluttering in her chest subsides. What dwells there now is a lightness, unfamiliar yet thrilling. It swells alongside the smile growing on Okita’s face, and just as quickly finds itself at home beside the warmth that Nobunaga breathes into Okita from the union of their lips.

**Author's Note:**

> If you ever wondered what (relatively) bad Xairathan writing looks like, this is it. I'm burned out. I wrote like over 33% of my Evangelion corpus in literally 2 months. I need a vacation. I'll probably revisit the themes I've poked at in this fic later... maybe.
> 
> If it looks like I tried to squeeze 3 different character explorations into one fic it's cause I did.


End file.
